Monday 27 July, 2009

MY FINAL PLAY SESSION

For my third and final play session I chose to do something a little different that both of my other sessions. I chose to obey the law, well as much as I could any ways. In my earlier experiences with the game I found that trying to do this often devolved into a police chase and ultimately death or arrest, after my poor driving led me to bump into a police car. So I left CJ’s house in search of some wholesome, law-abiding fun. I was immediately faced with a dilemma; walking was getting boring so I wanted to drive a car. However, to my knowledge there’s no legal way to buy a car in San Andreas and besides my meager beginning character didn’t have enough money to buy one if there were. So right off the bat I had to break the law and steal a car; a Cadillac, from a man who appeared to be in the Grove Street gang, so I suppose I was just borrowing it anyways. I drove around awhile obeying traffic lights and yielding to pedestrians. As uninteresting as this seems, driving safely is actually a greater challenge in San Andreas than driving recklessly. I also noticed that short of bumping into a police car and (sometimes) running over pedestrians, the police wouldn’t respond to simple traffic violations. I suppose that a game where you’re pulled over and fined for speeding every five minutes wouldn’t be so much fun, but then again maybe the police are disinterested in traffic violations because the city is so rife with violence. Driving around the city I got an even greater sense of the city as a living, breathing organism. Pedestrians went about their business, other cars hurried off to their own private destinations, and most interestingly I’d occasionally see a police car chase after another criminal; and I thought I was the only one the police were concerned with, how vain of me! Seeing this got me interested in another, more exciting prospect; what if I were to enforce the law instead of just following it? It was decided that I would do some police missions. I stole a police car (which is no easy feat) and off I went.

MY TIME AS A POLICEMAN

To this point in this entry I have probably gone into a little too much detail concerning my game play, so I will not delve as deeply into my time as a police officer. However, “fighting crime” raised several interesting ethical questions and so I will use my experience to further explore these. Is vigilantism ethical? In other words is it moral for an untrained person to track down and catch a wanted criminal? Should this make them a criminal themselves? How does GTA address these questions? To begin, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to acquire a police car. In my play time I had to commit crimes in order to attract police before I could steal one and ultimately so that I could do vigilante missions. It seems that in real life, a vigilante wouldn’t know about ongoing crimes so it is reasonable that one would have to go to extremes just to find such information. GTA semi-accurately represents the extremity, illegality, and difficulty of vigilantism. Furthermore, the entire time I was chasing criminals I had to dodge police cars it was clear that this wasn’t as valiant as it seemed. In a social context (and in a simulated social context, San Andreas) vigilantism isn’t viable. Sure one might say that a vigilante is trying to catch criminals and thus protect others. But I would argue that their circumvention of the law is the type of crime that may outweigh that of the accused criminals’. Gone is the prospect of a fair trial and burden of evidence, not to mention the danger you are putting others into. Vigilantism didn’t work well in the Wild West and it certainly couldn’t work in an industrialized culture where the social contract need be the strongest. GTA falters further in that, in order to complete a vigilante mission one much kill the criminal that you are after. No citizen’s arrest, no peaceful confrontation, but murder. Even real life vigilantes, as immoral and illegal their practice may be, would not agree that each and every crime deserves the same punishment, especially the punishment of brutal public murder.

This is a prime example of the limitations of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The intentions of the developer may be noble and I believe that there are many issues that are well represented, however the necessity to rectify social commentary and fun game play, often muddles the message. In this case vigilantism is made to seem extreme (and that’s a lot consider the rest of the game) but the nuances are lost in translation. I guess citizen arresting a shop lifter is much less exciting than gunning down a dangerous criminal.

Good point. On the other hand, you could argue that vigilantism (vigilanteism?) IS in fact extreme. I can't help but think of Batman... :-)

Haha, I was trying to say that vigilantism (I think this spelling is correct) is extreme and GTA does a decent job of representing the extremity. However, the game further dramatizes it and makes it even more extreme than is necessary. Batman on the other is ok as far as I'm concerned.